


Brihannalā

by toujours_nigel



Category: The Mahabharata
Genre: Character of Color, Hindu Character, Other, Transformation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-19
Updated: 2010-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-06 11:33:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is fit, now, for playing the dholak while others kill, naught else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brihannalā

**Author's Note:**

  * For [steelehearts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelehearts/gifts).



> "Angst, pathos, misunderstanding, melodrama. anything really, as long as it is slash. Just no purple prose. :D" &lt;\-- well, that was the prompt, and I hope I have been able to fulfill it, at least in part. It isn't slash in the sense of m/m sex, per se, but it is genderqueer. I hope it suits, any rate.

Next time, he will say yes, and drown in the woman’s body—whoever the woman is, the ones who seem harmless never are—and deal later with consequences. It is simply easier, that way, and at least he will have the memory of scented skin against his to lean against while Pānchāli takes his skin off. She is the lesser danger—if she hasn’t killed him for Subhadrā, she likely never will, though Kānāi might have had quite a lot to do with that, and Subhadrā’s swooning submission: Krishnā can never resist a supplicant. And even did she kill him, he would be dead.

 

Better death—better Narak, he has no illusions as to his sins—than this half-life, half-lived. Could she not have made him a woman—or is it that women are no more immune to Urvashi’s charms than men? The body of a woman in her prime, age beginning to thicken her waist and silver her hair and draw determination around her full mouth—his wife is such a woman, and the loveliest virgin, scarce ripening at sixteen, cannot hold a man’s attention when she walks past. To have her skin close around his flesh, fire-born and fire-burnt, and look with her blue-lotus eyes at a world in love with her—that would compensate, almost, for being unable to feel himself burn with the strain of placing gentle hands upon her, and know her joyous knowledge that he can crush her throat with the hands that cup her heavy breasts like easily-bruised peaches—can and never will. He could live her life, though he sees her eyes so hunted as she walks the halls alone—oh that she should have five husbands and still be forced thus to battle on her own—and his hand aches for his bow that he may slaughter those who look at her and see only her flesh and not her fiery eyes.

 

Yet he could live her life, and find peace in her body and her surety of place. Pānchāli—always Pānchāli, his guru’s enemy made his intimate friend, for she is friend to him—has been princess, and queen, and mendicant, and is now servant, but she has always been a woman, and still is, her body has changed like a flower coming to full bloom, like a lotus in the moonlight she has blossomed.

 

And his has changed like an aswattha lightning-struck, and a blackened husk of its once-proud splendour, he is a wreck of himself, he has no self, so changed, so devastated, neither man nor woman, hungering for arms that can lift a bow, and hands that can cook a meal—Bhima can cook, and his shovel-like hands swallow up his—her?—now-misshapen ones—and a voice that does not crack like an adolescent’s. What revenge is this, to make him so helplessly yearning—he refused her because she seemed a sword turned against him, and so she was, and he knows too well the feeling of a woman a sword in his hands and a shield against his enemies, and so too he knew Urvashi, and she has cut him to the quick, and bled away all his manhood, all his simple humanity. How is he to bear life, so, his brothers’ eyes on him in pity—in revulsion, Bhima’s hand shaking, light-firm on his shoulder, on his spine, unsure whether to embrace or cradle him, treat him as brother or sister—and Pānchāli’s in troubled compassion?

 

Were he himself he could bear it—he cannot, like Krishna, bear a mountain on one finger, but his shoulders were broad, before—but he has nothing left, that he can call himself, that is familiar to him in action or repose. She has taken his panther’s grace and left him a duck’s waddling gait, he trips when he goes to stride, and himself inept still pretends to teach princesses how to dance. He envies Shikhandi his—her? But Pānchāli calls him brother and so must he—measured strength, but Shikhandi has lived his life in that body and knows its ways as he knew his—this body is neither man’s nor woman’s nor his, he has had too little time to learn it, and no year, no matter how hard-lived, can teach him the skills he spent so many learning.

 

And his flesh was soft then, and his bones, and muscle had not settled and hardened beneath his skin—even this body, so strange to him, shows signs of wear, and lacking a man’s strength and a woman’s beauty has still in it some quiet determination—what is it like, Shikhandi’s life? Or the lives of those unprotected by royal fathers, and yet like him?—that bespeaks a long life, hard-won. But it is not his life, he is not this—Brihannalā, he calls himself to others, and murmurs to himself, Arjuna, Kounteya, Phālguna, Jishnu, Kiriti, Shwetavāhāna, Vhibhatsu, Vijaya, Pārtha, Savyasāchi, Dhananjaya, Pārthiba. All his many names can yet not hold at bay this slow seeping change that turns this alien body his, that turns him alien to himself and his kin.

 

He knows, now, what care goes into a woman’s beauty—he knew it already, child with two mothers who even in exile kept themselves queenly, husband to women for whom the world stops in its steps—and his hands long to touch their combs and ornaments, braid his own limp hair as he braids Uttarā’s, to redden his mouth and darken his lashes, and draw this unwieldy body into some semblance of a woman’s grace, learn some trick of eye and smile that will draw to him—a woman? a man?—a lover he can touch and taste and hold. Shikhandi has lovers, and not all are drawn by his wealth, or power—what use is it, to bed power, if you cannot wed it, too, and gain your own?—someone must desire him, who desires so much.

 

He wonders whether this is the true curse, that his body is so desirous, that it hungers so, and yet nobody hungers for it, that his wife touches him with cold hands, and his dreams are all of dark skin and bright eyes, and he wants, he wants, and cannot care, cannot remember that he is glad Krishnā does not desire him, for it would blot her honour, and he cannot defend her, that it would shame him to have his friend—oh, Kānāi, Murāri, Krishna, Gopālā, Vāsudeva, Mādhava, Giridhara, Keshava, Ghanashyām, Dāmodara, oh, Shyāmsundara, why have you left me so bereft, so helpless?—thus see him, so changed, so disfigured, when last they met in his pride of strength, because, oh, he wants, he hungers, so trapped in this body that will obey none of his commands, and can only yearn after impossibilities.


End file.
